Our 9/11 Journey

Catskill Farms is a 9/11 story, as many of you know.  Working in Soho on the new Scholastic building on Prince, eating breakfast on the 11th floor with a clean shot of the planes hitting the towers, somehow getting a hold of my girlfriend although most cell lines were overloaded, gathering at bars to huddle and think, walking home to Berkeley Place in Brooklyn, where cars and stoops were covered with ash.  Making my way down to help out one day.   Losing my job.  Losing my lease.

Buying a $25k 300 sq ft house without plumbing or heat (or siding, etc…)  ‘upstate’ with a credit card check that arrived in the mail shortly thereafter.  Adopting a stray cat and stray dog, both that got pregnant and having 5 puppies and 7 kittens running around – surely a headline if the SPCA would have caught wind.  No car.

And starting Catskill Farms with no money, shallow experience, no connections, no talented labor supply and hardly a relationship.  With a simple idea that we still work at today – that buying upstate didn’t/doesn’t have to be a compromise, or a 2nd choice, and there was no reason that smart people wouldn’t buy good houses if given the chance.

That was 20 years ago.  And 200 homes. And we remarkably still remain far from perfect, even with our daily effort to keep improving.

Borrowing from Winston Churchill – “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

On behalf of my entire team, I would like to thank you each and every one of you who has joined us in this journey.  My biggest regret of this entire thing of ours is that I’m too busy introducing new people the Farm that I don’t get to know better all the amazing people we’ve done business with.  Maybe that’s the next chapter.

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